Ziro

I want to talk about trains.

All locked down here in South Portland, which is about 50 minutes or so from Lewiston.

Your mom would do just fine on Mint, and you know it.

Or, please, trains.

I will tell you why atheism, regardless of the horse on which it rides, is a step toward progress: it is because belief in fantasy is an opiate that numbs us and stymies progress toward improving the welfare of all.

I think that the left-right dichotomy is inherently flawed. A lot of what I believe might be considered “right-leaning” or “left-leaning,” but I cannot say that I prescribe to either sort of ideology fully or with any fidelity.

I will always be opposed to any view with a pervasive “moral” authority, and both the so-called left and right are obsessed with their own versions of this. The problem we run into is the false supposition that beliefs can be categorized on a spectrum spanning right to left (or, even more liberally, a spectrum spread across two dimensions). It has been a ridiculous notion from its inception, whenever that might have been.

Building one’s identity (another silly notion, in general—identity itself being a frivolous construct that functions only as a fulcrum for the extortion of social power) upon a supposed spectrum is likewise ridiculous. You can be conservative or liberal, or anything, really. But those beliefs do not exist in a linear or planar dimension. They are so far removed from each other that one cannot fathom sliding incrementally from one to the next.

And to each respective party, “left” and “right,” the other can be demonized as evil, even without full comprehension of the other. It’s all just so damned tribalistic and silly.

Right. So, I don’t get why it should matter where, exactly, the bar of soap goes.

Isn’t the soap that touches the body ablated by friction with the skin?

I like Flatpak for what it is. It’s great. But I wish that the application IDs weren’t so long.

It does. I am disappointed in the game studios who refuse to allow Linux players, though, such as Bungie. I’m certain that Destiny would be playable if not for their obstinacy.

I switched to Firefox when I switched to Linux. It’s great. I remember when firefox/mozilla was the go-to browser. It could be again.

USB One X

Thank you. I appreciate your perspective. Using Linux again has been like a breath of fresh air, honestly. I just love how fast everything is. (Both my Windows and Mint boots live on their own M.2 drives, but Mint is so, so much faster.) And, unlike Windows, I don’t feel like I have to jerry rig it to get things to work. I’m sure there are instances where that is the case, but I haven’t run into them yet.

This is why I had to switch. It was just too clunky to get CUDA and Pytorch and Tensorflow set up in Windows. In Linux, it was a total breeze.

Edit: And then I thought, “well, wouldn’t it be great if I didn’t have to use Windows to use Linux?”

I know it’s not a very Linuxy distro, but Linux Mint (Cinnamon) is so easy to use, especially for Windows users. I’ve completely replaced Windows (and with better software), aside from using Windows for a few games that require it. I used Ubuntu, Suse, and Fedora long ago, but for me, Mint takes the proverbial cake.

Have you tried Linux?

I know that we all love decentralization, but not everyone will buy into it as a concept, unfortunately, and that is their wont. As long as we have a community that is large enough, it doesn’t matter that it isn’t mainstream. It would certainly be nice to have more diverse voices, though.

Wow, this is me.

It’s a bit of a mixed bag. I do enjoy Lemmy. I think that the conversations that take place here are interesting (though many now revolve around Reddit in one way or another). I don’t really find the front page to be as good as Reddit’s.

And then, of course, I think the most important difference is that Lemmy draws a specific type of person, even after the Reddit migration, and there aren’t as many of us as there are average Internet users. I’m not saying Lemmings are a special breed; rather, I’m saying that we’re the sort of people who might have used Usenet at its peak. We’re the sort who might be Linux users. Many of us are morally aligned with open source technology and the ethics thereof. This makes the discussions a little less diverse on Lemmy than they are on Reddit (which can be good and bad, depending on the sort of conversation).

It’ll be even worse when there are no new series to watch because all of the people who write them are on strike. The content mines are drying up.